This Gamified Version Of Physiotherapy Can Save Your Money In The Most Interesting Way

This young stripling is on the right track.

The competition has been rising leading to low priced products but there does not seem a world where medical expenses will ever be affordable for major treatments. And when such difficulty arises when one finds it problematic to receive cheap and effective solutions, technology comes to rescue.

But while you must have heard of the vast applications of Virtual Reality, what about its blend with the medical sector?

Well, a startup named Fizio based in Faridabad has been using Microsoft Kinect to gamify physiotherapy not only to make it an affordable solution for the ones seeking physical therapy but also providing them with a fun exercise.

The innovative concept of Fizio came from Divyanshu Varshney when he faced a life-altering accident. He was accompanied by his friend on a motorcycle when they both faced serious injuries. Consequences of the accident made him discover how inconvenient it was to find decent physiotherapy and therefore went on to fix the broken industry with affordable treatment.

But the origination of the idea can be credited to the time prior to the accident.

Divyanshu Varshney was one of those students who used to find his engineering college life monotonous. Possessing a transcending trait, he always dreamt of doing something big and significant. Therefore, he contacted Roopam Sharma, the person who was an inspiration to Divyanshu.

Roopam was a fashion model from his college who went to become one of MIT's top eight innovators under 35 in India. After meeting Roopam, Divyanshu found the key to entrepreneurial bug and it was during this span of time when he met with the accident.

"It was on October 1, 2015, I while travelling on a two wheeler with my friend Chhavnish met with a deadly accident and got my leg fractured," Divyanshu told WittyFeed.

The post treatment required heavy physiotherapy sessions.

Divyanshu shared, "The recovery required physiotherapy rehabilitation care, and we lacked personal financial resources to afford such care. [My friend], the more unfortunate one among us, due to lack of physiotherapy services, developed a serious condition and had to undergo a surgery and has till this date never been able to fully recover."

Seeing all this, Roopam suggested Divyanshu to take a step towards solving the broken physiotherapy system in India which provided less optimal services.

Fizio which is a product of Spiro Studios, came out as a solution.

Divyanshu then began visiting his neighbouring physiotherapy clinics in search of finding a solution for the services which, in words of Divyanshu, simply did not exist. Subsequently, he tried to gamify physical therapy with the help of virtual rehab and hence Fizio was born.

The product is a software based rehabilitation platform which makes physical therapy convenient and a fun exercise for patients recovering from injury or surgery.

The games have been designed for different pathologies in such a way that they are motivating and adaptable to a patient's needs.

How does it work?

With Roopam Sharma as the Chief Patron and Mentor of Spiro Studios and Divyanshu Varshney as the Founder and CEO of Spiro Studios, Fizio, with the help of 3D-Full Body Motion Sensing, animates the in-game avatar of a person by using real-time motion capture data. The skeleton is tracked, and then the functions performed are simulated in the virtual environment.

This is followed by sending the analyses of the users to the Microsoft Azure Server, hosting the database, which in turn helps to measure the evolution of the patient on his way to recovery that too in a safe environment.

Achievements and Recognitions

#1 Microsoft Technical Fellow and DECODED Show host, John Shewchuk described about Fizio on the DECODED blog as "a multi-massive online game realized with a small team in just a few months, and demonstrated through the scalability of Microsoft Azure."

The team has many future plans on the list.

The team which is based in two areas of the country namely Faridabad and Haryana wants to make Fizio accessible to every person who has lacked physiotherapy services due to financial constraints and hence aims to offer:

• Affordable and accessible physiotherapy to low and middle-income patients.• A mechanism for physiotherapists to keep track of patients' progress at remote locations.• Scores after level completions, marking progress and time to recover.• As a networking tool to share experiences• A better rehabilitation ecosystem in the developing countries.

Divyanshu is a modern day entrepreneur whose undying commitment and belief in his abilities makes him a next-gen technology expert. And his unmatched quality has made him an alumnus of Manav Rachna University.